Mobile wireless communication in the form of telephony and data connections has become an essential part of our lives and in many ways replaces the fixed connections we have been used to for the past decades. In some parts of the world people and machines is becoming connected with each other only via mobile solutions and not via fixed connections, such as for instance in developing countries but also to some extent in the developed countries.
Usage of wireless telecommunication networks is increasing dramatically over time and the behaviour changes as we shift the volume of traffic from voice to use of data traffic in the telecommunication networks. This is true both for applications requiring access to packet based networks, such as browsers, email communication, cloud based storage, and so on, and for voice related applications as Voice over IP (VoIP) applications. This increase of data traffic sets up demands on the networks to handle large volumes of data traffic and with an always connected situation our devices are always connected to a packet data network, e.g. the Internet connected to different applications. Because of the limited access to wireless infrastructure, cell congestion, device battery life, and similar resource management issues, there is therefore a need for regulating the amount of data traffic in the networks.
In a roaming scenario, i.e. when the user device (UE) is connected to a network of a network operator different from the one that the user has a subscription with, there is also charging issues to be taken into account. The user does not want to get charged for traffic data that the user is aware of or has initiated. The same applies for situations where the user has a subscription where data traffic costs are incurred based on amount of data transferred.
In 2G/3G/4G networks the UE may be provided with an Internet protocol (IP) address for connection to an IP based network and for sending data and receiving data. In such a scenario downlink data will be directed to the UE from any service located on the packet data network connected to the UE even if the UE is active or inactive.
There are situations when it is big advantage to the end user to block most IP traffic and only receive some IP traffic from selected hosts or services. Typical use cases when one would like to enable communication with only selected hosts/services are:                When roaming, one would like to be able to for instance send or receive mails but no other traffic in order to keep the roaming costs low. If this is introduced in an operator's network, it would make the users dare to stay connected to certain services also abroad and therefore consume some data. This will increase Mobile network operators (MNO) revenue compared to today when most users have their data connections turned off while roaming.        When the phone/tablet/PC enters a low-power mode, only wake up on incoming mails or VoIP calls to reduce power consumption.        A Machine to Machine (M2M) device would only like to be reachable from a certain host to reduce power consumption and increase security by using filtering in a suitable communication infrastructure node as a firewall        Parent control. Parents would like to restrict what their children can access on the internet. The reason can be because of a cost perspective (e.g. streaming Spotify costs a lot) and also be able to block certain services not fit for children.        
There is no solution today where the UE can request a mobile network to apply gating/filtering functionality for the use cases described above.
The UE may comprise a terminal equipment (TE) and a mobile terminal (MT) and some existing solutions for the TE is to instruct a mobile terminal (MT) to only delivery selective data are expected to result in that a filter is applied in the MT but that arbitrary data is received from the wireless IP network to the TE.
Parental control could be introduced in UEs by firewalls in the OS of the UE. The firewall could then be configured to only let specific traffic through. However, there are no such solutions in key UE operative systems of today. Once again, a firewall in the UEs would also result in unnecessary traffic being sent to the UE.